98 BRUCE GIBSON
dedecorem amplexi uitam reditusque pudendos.
nox fauet et grata profugos amplectitur umbra.
(Theb. 11.757–61)
Meanwhile the beaten Pelasgi abandon their doomed rampart by
stealth; none of them have their own standards or their own leader: they
go silently all over the place and they embrace a disgraceful life and
shameful returns home instead of a noble death. Night favours them
and enfolds the fugitives with welcome shade.Philip Hardie (1997, 152) has pointed to how the end of Book 11
evokes the end of the Aeneid, but the point can also be made here that
at a stroke Statius uses the device of temporary epic closure with the
onset of night in a way which completely undermines the heroic status
of the Argive host, who just slip away. The epic convention of night
here is also the night of oblivion, as the living Argives become name-
less henceforth; what we do not get is the motif of the onset of heroic
death as night; instead a disgraced life is one that is lived in shadow.
The only instance of daybreak leading directly to combat comes in
Book 12, when the onset of dawn leads to Theseus heading off to bat-
tle against the Thebans. Even here, however, Statius varies the con-
vention, describing the dawn not from the perspective of the overall
narrator, but from that of Theseus:
Atticus at contra, iubar ut clarescere ruptis
nu bibus et solem primis aspexit in armis,
desilit in campum ...
(Theb. 12.709–11)
But the Athenian, on the other hand, when he saw the light grow clear
as the clouds broke up, and saw the sunlight on tips of the weapons,
leapt down into the field ...We can see, then, that Statius adopts in the battle narratives of the
Thebaid the epic tradition of structuring by means of days and nights,
but with an original approach: there are even two examples, as we
have seen, where the conventional strong divide between the action of
a night and the day that follows is in fact elided.
Fading in and outA separate aspect of Statius’ technique is his willingness to introduce
material which takes away the audience from scenes of battle and the